begin oe_protect.scr
Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> __/ [ Mark Kent ] on Monday 04 September 2006 11:40 \__
>
>> begin oe_protect.scr
>> Rex Ballard <rex.ballard@xxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>>
>>> casioculture@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>>>> Microsoft has never bothered me as much as Google does.
>>>>
>>>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/03/google_eavesdropping_software/
>>>> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060609-7028.html
>>>
>>> OK. That one really does make me nervous. Turn on the microsoft so
>>> that we can just "listen to what's going on" and use "fingerprinting"
>>> to identify "target noises". This sounds so much like "big Brother"
>>> it's really spooky.
>>>
>>> I'm a big fan of google, and I think it's really great that they are
>>> willing to index my web site and anything else I want indexed for the
>>> public.
>>>
>>> I like google desktop, and I like that they can index anything on my
>>> desktop - for me.
>>>
>>> But what if google decides that this Microphone should start doing
>>> text-to-speech, recording everything I say, on the phone, to my wife,
>>> or to a coworker, or to a client, and starts publishing it in real-time
>>> even before I know what I want published an what I don't.
>>>
>>> That seems like something Microsoft would do, not google.
>>>
>>> I hope they've slapped this research guy silly for suggesting this
>>> brilliant idea.
>>> On the other hand, if they have a patent, they can at least prevent
>>> anyone else from doing it for the next 20 years.
>>>
>>
>> This kind of thing is likely to happen, though, isn't it? Imagine that
>> a smallish device has a flat, internal microphone embedded, maybe just a
>> simple piezo device (crystal mike, as they used to be called, I think?),
>> something without the capability of determining actual speech, but good
>> enough to take a reliable guess at a few things...
>>
>> Of course, if you become the television, then it would be easier to get
>> the broadcaster to insert RDS-like data to focus the advertising on your
>> web-browsing to match what's on the tele, /but/, this does assume that
>> the same person is doing both.
>
>
> And closed systems encourage this. In Digg, the following is added: "Peter
> Norvig, who directs research at Google, told Technology Review that this
> software would start to show up in Google software 'sooner rather than
> later'."
>
>
>> This reminds me of a claim by a senior researcher from an Israeli NEP I
>> used to do business with claiming that people would never want more than
>> 2Mbit/s into their houses because that's all your brain could handle in
>> one go. I told him what I thought of that at the time... it's just
>> naive thinking; imagining that you can predict just /what/ a person is
>> going to do with something.
>
>
> It's not a question of how much a person can process (per unit of time). It's
> about what one might 'pull', for subsequent processing, like in post-crime
> CCTV footage.
That's /precisely/ the argument I used to attempt to illustrate his
error - he didn't understand, of course, and implied that I was being a
bit dim...
>
> Have a load of /this/ (explains subject line):
>
> Tech boost for memory power
>
> http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/08/31/memory.sensecam/index.html
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
>| One prototype that already goes some way towards that eventuality
>| is Microsoft's SenseCam, picked out by Bill Gates in a recent Time
>| magazine interview as one of the software giant's most exciting projects.
>|
>| [...]
>|
>| For the past eight years researcher Gordon Bell has been digitally
>| documenting every photograph, note, e-mail and document relevant to his
>| life. More recently, he has started using a SenseCam to automatically
>| record details of his daily movements. All that material is then uploaded
>| to a searchable database called "MyLifeBits."
>|
>| Bell says his ambition is to have "a complete record of my physical being
>| in cyberspace" and even admits feeling a sense of emotional loss after
>| misplacing an Outlook folder recently.
> `----
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> *LOL* Outlook...
>
> It's like that Frasier episode where Daphne loses a tape of one of his radio
> shows, which he cannot recover.
>
> As I said in the reply to Rex, Microsoft is copying Google's pattern, whether
> it's benevolent or not.
>
It's possible, of course. Google's advantage is an enormous processing
machine and a huge database. Their question? What can you do with it?
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
This is the theory that Jack built.
This is the flaw that lay in the theory that Jack built.
This is the palpable verbal haze that hid the flaw that lay in...
|
|
